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Melvin’s hand is up.

He’s a 13-year-old African American with too much energy and not enough self-control.

He’s often angry and out of his seat. He’s usually in trouble. But today he’s sitting forward in his chair with his hand raised high and a look on his face like he’ll explode if I don’t pick him right this second.

So I do.

“Mr. Singer! Can I show my imovie now!?”

This is a first. He hasn’t turned in a lick of homework all month.

“Wow! You’re really excited about this, aren’t you?” I say.

“Yeah,” he responds. “I was up all night finishing it.”

I start to doubt this, but he does look awfully tired underneath that urgent need to share.

“Airdrop it to me from your ipad,” I say, “and I’ll put it up on the SMART Board.”

This takes a few minutes.

Let’s face it.

Over the past several years, I have been contacted several times by current and former Success Academy teachers. I met with each of them. They wanted to tell me what really goes on, and their stories sounded alike. They say the atmosphere for teachers is terrible. Teacher turnover is high. They say the children are subjected to pressures that make some of them crack. They say that children pee in their pants while prepping for the tests and taking the tests. They say the schools keep a supply of clean clothes for these incidents. They say that test prep starts in November and doesn’t let up until the tests are ended. They say that students who can’t keep up are subtly pushed out, for example, calling in their parent day after day until the parent gives up and withdraws the student and returns him/her to public school. Each of them…

It is a school day in Néw York City. Across the city, over one million children are in class.

But not the children of Eva’s Success Academies! They (and possibly some allied charters) are holding a mass rally at Cadman Plaza Park in Brooklyn. The park is lined with rented buses. As the children and their parents step off the buses, an adult hands them a hand-lettered sign to carry, demanding more support for charter schools.

There are multiple buses for the recording and video services. This is a well-funded, professionally orchestrated demonstration of support for privatization. If public schools closed for a political rally, their principals would be fired.

The children and parents are all wearing identical red tee-shirts, with the slogan “Dont Steal Possible.” This slogan works nicely in suggesting that someone is trying to close down charter schools, and this imminent threat to their survival must be…

The Common Core visionaries dreamed of a world where every student across the nation would have the same standards, a curriculum aligned with the standards, and all students taking one of two tests aligned with the standards. Everything would be RIGORous, we would find out how woefully bad our schools are, teachers would stop “lying” to students, and parents would flee to charters and voucher schools. Best of all, according to Secretary Duncan, parents in Oregon could compare their child with children in other states.

According to this story in the Néw York Times by Motoko Rich, the dream is falling apart.

Several states have adjusted their passing score to avoid telling 70% of the state’s students that they failed.

“The Common Core has been bedeviled by controversy almost from the start; because of the backlash, a few states have already abandoned the Common Core. Fewer than half of the…

Jan Resseger served for many years as program director for education justice of the United Church of Christ. She is a woman with a strong social conscience, who is devoted to the well-being of all children. She lives in Ohio. When I first visited Cleveland, I had the privilege of being escorted by Jan, who showed me the stark disparities between the affluent suburbs and the downtrodden inner-city.

Jan Resseger writes here of the calamities imposed on our nation’s education system by Arne Duncan, who changed the national education goal from equality of educational opportunity for all to a “race to the top” for the few. He shifted our sights from equal opportunity and equitable funding to test scores; he pretended that poverty was unimportant and could be solved by closing public schools and turning children over to private entrepreneurs who had little supervision.

Read Jan’s entire piece: Duncan was…

Steven Singer, who teaches in Pennsylvania, explains the planned insanity behing standardized testing, rigged for failure. He likens the situation to a video game that he played with his friend as a child, where the questions and answers might suddenly and arbitrarily change.

In Pennsylania, the privatization movement started with deep budget cuts. Then comes a new standardized test. Too many students did well, so the tests were made more “rigorous.” Now, most students “fail.”

Did they get dumber? No. Did he become a worse teacher? He says no.

So what’s up? The students are set up to fail. The teachers and schools are set up to fail? Why? It clears the way for charters and vouchers.

One hopeful sign in Pennsylvania: Governor Tom Wolf wants to help public schools, not destroy them. Unlike his predecessor, Tom Corbett.

Singer writes:

“In my home state, the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment…

In the previous post, I referred to Din Armstrong of Lee County, Florida, as a hero for his principled stand against Florida’s insane obsession with testing.

Here is more from Don Armstrong:

“Good morning, everyone. Like always, I spend my Sunday, gathering my thoughts and thinking of the upcoming week over a cup of coffee.

“One thought that has crossed my mind this past week is regarding our Constitution. Perhaps this is due to the fact that last week was Constitution Week in the United States. Yet, while listening to our leaders in Tallahassee, as well as many here locally, it seems the Constitution is rarely considered in their talk about parent rights and student rights, specifically with regard to what options and control parents have in schools.

“Specifically, I am referring to our Lee County, FL school district’s stance on parent rights to opt out of testing. In a…

Jeff Bryant aptly describes the battle for control of public education in New York City. A group of billionaires–actually, nine of them–have formed an organization called “Families for Excellent Schools.” The name, like all of those invented by the corporate reformers, is intended to confuse the public into thinking that the group consists of families who are eager to improve all schools or families who are on the waiting list for a charter school. In fact, the “families” that contribute to this group have one goal: to increase the number of charter schools, without regard to collateral damage to the public schools that enroll the other 1 million children in public schools.

The billionaires, as Bryant shows, have opposed Mayor de Blasio’s programs to expand universal pre-kindergarten, to support struggling schools instead of closing them, to provide more reading specialists and counselors, and to make more AP classes available. They…

Governor Brown has until October 11 to sign or veto legislation that would ban for-profit charter schools in California. it is outrageous to squander taxpayer dollars on profits for investors and outrageous executive salaries. This bill should be a slam dunk for Governor Brown, a man with a keen sense of justice. Now I hope the legislature tightens oversight of nonprofit charter schools and reviews their executive salaries to be sure that they really are nonprofit. And while they are at it, they should ban charter schools in affluent communities, which violate the spirit if the charter movement, which wassupposedto help the neediest kids, not to enable rich parents to create a publicly-funded private school for their children.

Here is the legislation awaiting Governor Brown’s signature:

“For-profit charter schools: Charter schools run by for-profit corporations would not be allowed in California under the terms of AB 787, authored by Assemblyman…

On Sept. 23, Teach for America (TFA) published an article on its Website about the “Badass Women of Teach for America.”

Many of the more than 56,000 members of the Badass Teachers Association (BATS) commented on this article.

A few days later, all comments were deleted and the ability to make any additional comments was disabled. TFA then published two additional articles about the comments BATS had made. The authors of these new articles then attempted to debunk what had been written about them but was too dangerous to be left for their readers to see for themselves.

The counter-narratives of hundreds of people had been erased. But as any good public school teacher will tell you – nothing that is posted on the Internet is ever lost.

Below is every comment made on the original TFA article.

And, yes, I mean –

EVERY. SINGLE. COMMENT.